Of all the pantomime villains that stalk the movies, few are as loathed as the remake. The endless reheating of leftovers has come to symbolise everything rotten about Hollywood, a staple feature in trotted-out arguments that modern filmgoers have never had it so bad. But for all the odium hurled their way, they just keep coming: Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is about to be released and we're to be offered new spins on Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Lately, the very term remake has become so toxic that filmmakers are reaching for less unloved R words – reinterpretation, re-boot or (be still my delicate guts) reimagining. Others are quick to point out their movies aren't really remakes at all, but sequels or prequels to old favourites (a tactic used both by the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Thing, to be released in December).

Similarly, you could claim that rather than being a remake of the beloved TV series, Tinker Tailor is, in fact, an independent adaptation of John le Carré's novel. But in this case all that finessing does the film a disservice, putting it needlessly on the defensive. It's a beautifully-judged thriller whose relationship with its predecessor simply gives it another layer of interest. In this it's not alone. I say enough. The time has come for the remake to stop being ashamed of itself.

For one thing, the idea that modern cinema is uniquely cursed by remakes is factually shonky – movies have been remade for almost as long as they've been made. For another, I wouldn't call it a curse. Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula doesn't pack the same subcutaneous menace of the silent Nosferatu, but this would be a poorer world had Bela Lugosi never sported a velvet-lined cape. John Patterson wrote last week about the way Akira Kurosawa's samurai masterpieces were reshaped into some of Hollywood's greatest westerns, while inspiration flowed from the US to Europe for neither the first nor last time when Rainer Werner Fassbinder took Douglas Sirk's lush portrait of American repression All That Heaven Allows and relocated it to 70s Germany for Fear Eats The Soul. The remake can act as a quality control too. David Cronenberg took a kitschy slice of B-movie as a template before gleefully ripping it up and conjuring a new film that was more witty, grotesque and tragic with The Fly.

The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Postman Always Rings Twice, the John Carpenter version of The Thing now being prequelled, Werner Herzog's impeccable Nosferatu… In the right hands the remake has its own special pleasures, the contours of a familiar premise ready for a filmmaker to leave their stamp on, much as a jazz singer improvises around a standard. Fans of Christopher Nolan's Batman series would surely attest to the wonders that can be worked with recycled material – for my money The Dark Knight felt far more strange and bracing than Inception precisely because Nolan was going to unexpected places with characters we thought we already knew.

A single moment of invention can justify a remake's whole existence. For all the McCarthyite chill of the 1956 original, I'm not sure anyone who's seen Phillip Kaufman's 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers will have ever shaken off its mordant flourish of an ending – just as The Ring, the 2002 remake of the Japanese phenomenon Ringu, struck an indelible note all of its own with a horse aboard a ferry.

The tweaks can be subtle. While there were predictable squawks of outrage about Let Me In, the American remake of Alfredson's Let The Right One In, it was notable for the way small shifts here and there paid the Swedish original its respects but established itself as a fine (more or less) human drama in its own right.

Or the transformation can be more obvious – Howard Hawks's caustic 1932 gangster melodrama Scarface is an emblem of its era just as Brian De Palma's coked-out fever dream would be half a century later. Occasionally the world changing around a story makes all the difference: in 2008, The Dark Knight's themes of nihilistic terror and rough justice had real-world echoes that wouldn't have been as glaringly applicable to the previous Batman films.

Equally, plenty of the venom aimed at remakes comically overrates the earlier version. In truth, Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wasn't so good that its memory is likely to be besmirched by David Fincher's impending take on the material.

The hostility also misses the very nature of originality in movies. If almost all fiction draws on a finite pool of themes, characters and scenarios, then in film that process has long hardened into a scarily precise, archetype-heavy three-act formula recognisable in vast numbers of movies of every conceivable type. That's not just Hollywood's fault – it's also what happens when countless stories are told in the same visual medium in chunks of between 90 minutes and two hours. Plotwise, there's only so many directions to go in.

Throw in genre expectations and the case for "original" films and nothing but looks even shakier. Can anyone name three meaningful differences between Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached? Was the 2004 remake of George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead intrinsically less interesting than the zombie flicks that ripped it off in the 26 years previous? After more than a hundred years of cinema, originality in film is a relative concept, influence is everywhere – and the poor, derided remake has had a bum rap.

But let's be clear: I'm not defending Tim Burton. Some causes are beyond the pale.